[thelist] RE: The future of XML

[Christopher Orth]

> assumes that you can use the same content from your web site on a WAP phone
> or PDA - you can't. If I do a 2000 word article for my web site, I can't
> just transform the XML and present it as WML. I could do the really dodgy


Yes and no.  You cant use the same presentation of the content, but you can
use the same content in general.  When talking about an XML based system
that would stream the "same content" out to multiple devices people are more
often meaning that the content would have been pre-formatted for each of
those devices by writing an appropriate bit for each device/application.
This all gets wrapped up in the same XML store.  For example, you might have
an articlebody-long, and articlebody-medium and and articlebody-brief.  All
of these would share the same articleheader and would all discuss the same
information to varying levels of detail.  But you obviously wouldn¹t send
the long version of the article body text to a cell phone and would instead
send the brief version.

This concept also works for privacy issues.  You could create multiple
presentations from the same set of information for something such as medical
records.  Certain audiences like a doctor could see all the information but
other audiences might only see the overview information.  This would allow
one data store to feed a huge number of clients and applications and is
essentially one of the true powers of using an XML based system.

But you are right that a cell phone sized devices isn't going to view the
same "web" as we view now on computer based browsers.  The content will be
the same but the presentation will change.



-- 

Christopher Orth
corth at nwlink.com
http://www.awakemm.com/christopher/
Poser Arcana - http://www.awakemm.com/poserarcana/